Icy Exhale

I have a twelve-year-old cat.  In actuality, she is more of an avatar of every neurosis I have ever experienced than a normal cat.  She is a black Manx with green eyes.  She is missing a fang from the time she bit my bulldog.  Because she has no tail, when she walks away from me it appears she is wearing pants.  When she sits, the fluff on her pants looks more like a skirt pooling around her hips, all dainty like Scarlet O’Hare sitting on a tuffet…reading a picture book.

Pixie and I are psychically linked, much like witches and their familiars of old.  When I am off kilter, she manifests all manner of my disturbance, poor little thing.  This week has been more than my Manx can handle, causing her to manifest some neurosis of her own.

My friend, Sara, came for a visit from Gainesville.  Sara and I met in the 4^th grade.  We became friends in the 5^th grade.  Obviously, we go way back.  We don’t get to see each other as often as we’d like, what with life getting in the way as it does.  She is a schoolteacher and I am a waitress/author/kung fu princess.  These vocations keep one very busy and prohibit long weekends of catching up with old friends.

Sara did not come to town just to see me; she came to visit her mother as well, who lives about an hour away from my house.  For the three days she is in town, Sara goes between her mom’s house and mine.  We spend the evenings talking and drinking wine.  In the evenings, Pixie is accustomed to me being in the blue room and writing or coloring a picture from my Sesame Street coloring book.  Sometimes I practice the Thriller dance, but usually I am engaged in some sort of writerly activity.  Pixie likes it when I compose blog essays, as I ask her opinion on these things.  While Sara is in town, Pixie is not asked for her opinion and the coloring pages I present to tape over the litter box do not amuse her.

Though we do not spend a lot of time upstairs in my room, Sara’s things stay in my room while she is here.  This makes sense; she’s not going to keep her dainties in the living room, now is she?  These things not of me are a concern for Pixie.  It is of even further concern that I sleep downstairs and Sara sleeps in my bed.  After the first night, Pixie is convinced that this is a new order of things and begins to yank massive amounts of hair out of her neck and shoulders.

When I go into my room after Sara’s first night in town, I find soft black hair floating on the carpet.  Pixie peeks from under the bed.  She has a stray piece of black fluff hanging from her fang.  I give her some cat candy and give her some love.  She wants no part of my traitorous affection, as I have abandoned the blue room for the couch and dogs all the way downstairs, where Pixie does not like to go.

On the second night of my friend’s visit, I take to the couch where I can read without disturbing Sara’s attempts to go to sleep.  Pixie stands at the top of the stairs and meows her indignity at having been abandoned and left to the infidel, Sara, who does not smell like everything else in the room and does not give out candy at the slightest provocation.  I invite Pixie to the couch.  My invitation is met with such yowling that the dogs whimper in fear.

Sara left this morning.  For the three days she was in town I worked on about five hours of sleep.  It’s not like I’m going to go to bed any earlier just because I wake up at nine.  So, Sara and I have coffee and I see her off.  And then I crawl up the stairs to my room, where I beg entrance.  Pixie concedes.  I lie across my familiar bed and tuck into pillows and my blankie.

Pixie stalks with urgency across my body as though there is gossip she has been waiting with baited breath to tell me.  Her green eyes are wide and frantic, conveying dialogue like, “You wouldn’t believe it!  There was a woman in here and she didn’t recognize my superiority like you do.  NO!  I didn’t bite her but she thought it was fine to leave her socks where you leave your socks.  It wasn’t alright, was it?  I mean, that’s where your socks go.  Is she gone, she really is gone, right?  And I don’t have to share my bed with anyone else but you from now on?  Oh god please give me some cat candy, I haven’t eaten in three days!”

She tunnels into the blankets and proceeds to peddle furiously, all the while purring and meowing.  It’s as though she is trying to work a Stair Master with her front paws, and she is doing this on my chest.  After she has worked out most of her angst on my body, she collapses on my head and plants her front paw firmly on my face as though this will contain me.  Then she starts eating my hair.  She is purring but it is not soothing, as a cat’s purring usually seems.  No, there is a frenzy in her purr and it seems my hair is a tonic for her nerves.  I do not stop her eating my hair and she finally falls asleep.  We take a two-hour nap.  My Siamese, who is not nearly as burdened by change, sleeps fitfully on my legs as though nothing has been amiss.  I think she liked not having to put up with me for a few days.

Pixie has always been a little weird and reclusive.  She won’t let anyone but me feed her, for instance.  She shuns affection from even me unless the moon is in Pisces and Mercury is not in retrograde.  About six years ago, my sister Brittany bought me a book called How to Live with a Neurotic Cat. I thought it was just a novelty gift until this last weekend.  I pulled it off the shelf halfway through day one of having a houseguest.  I turn to this tome like it’s a manual that may very well save my cat’s sanity and a portion of my hairline.

The moral of this is that little sisters sometimes have more foresight than we might think.  Novelty gifts are often lifesavers in disguise, and my hair has anti-anxiety properties for my cat.  This might have something to do with the organic catnip supplements I take twice a day for my own nerves.  Like I said, my cat and I are psychically linked.